Russell Banks - Affliction

She said, “This scares me a whole lot. We shouldn’t do this.”

“It’s all right. We’re not who we are. I’m Jack, and you’re Lillian.” He reached down and placed his hands on her shoulders. He let his hands slide to her breasts and gently hold them, and she laid her head back against him, her breath coming rapidly now, as he moved his hands over her breasts, her nipples hardening, her hands on his, pressing them against her. Then he was kissing her neck, her ears, her cheeks and her lips, and she was kissing him back, and they were standing in the room holding tightly to one another, and in seconds they were moving through the darkness to the bedroom.

She said to me, “I knew it was wrong, but it isn’t like I was married to Jack or anything. And things had been pretty bad between him and me lately anyway, Jack and me, since that hunting accident he was involved with. I guess I was mad at him. And I liked Wade, you know, he was like an old friend, ever since I was a kid, and he had always been real sweet to me, and he seemed so sad and all. I really felt sorry for him. And it was like just this one time. I had never been what you’d call attracted to Wade, but this one night, it was different. And making me call him Jack like that, and him calling me Lillian, it was strange, like being real high, and it kind of took me over, you know?”

Wade undressed her in the darkness, and then he took off his own clothes and moved onto her, gently kissing her with his damaged mouth, drawing her warm breath into him, gulping it down. He lifted himself up on his arms, and she opened to him like a flower, and he entered her, easily, with excruciating slowness, until he was all the way in, and he felt huge to himself, as if he had gone all the way up into her chest and were touching Lillian’s heart.

Down in front of the store, a burgundy pickup pulled off the road and parked next to Pop’s truck. The road was empty and dark. The store windows reflected the flash of the headlights, while Jack sat in his truck and peered up through the windshield and saw that there were no lights on in Hettie’s apartment. Shit, he thought, and he looked at his watch in the green glow of the dashboard.

Then, wondering what the hell Wade’s father’s truck was doing parked in front of the store by the gas pump, he got out and looked inside, thinking that maybe the old bastard had passed out and was lying on the seat. Gone. Strange. The sonofabitch’s probably three sheets to the wind down at Toby’s, wondering where the hell he left his truck, Jack thought.

He moved around to the front of his own truck, and pulled a small notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket, and, in the reflected splash from the headlights off the store windows, scribbled a note and tore it from the pad. He walked heavily up the stairs to the landing and stopped in front of Hettie’s door. He studied the door for a second, and thought, What the hell, maybe she came home already and fell asleep, and he turned the doorknob. The door swung open, and Jack stepped inside.

“Hettie?” he called into the darkness. “Hey, babes, you here?” Silence.

“By then, when Jack came,” Hettie explained to me, “we were just lying there in the darkness, you know? Not saying anything, just thinking, I guess, about what we’d done. This terrible thing we’d done, Wade and me. I was really scared when I heard Jack outside, and then, when he actually came into the apartment, I jumped, and I was so scared I almost screamed. But I didn’t. Wade, he didn’t even seem to react. I mean, like he just lay there the same way, without even his breathing changing, his hands behind his head, like he was going to lie there on his back naked in bed and let Jack walk right into the room. It was weird.

“But then I heard Jack bump against something in the living room, and he swore and tried to find the light switch on the wall, you know, right by the door. But he couldn’t find it, so he backed outside to the landing again, thank God, and a few seconds later, I heard him go back down the stairs, and finally I heard his truck drive off.”

Slowly, Wade sat up and swung his legs off the bed, as if he were an old sick man. He stood and in the darkness began to dress. He and Hettie said nothing to each other, and when he was dressed, he walked from the bedroom to the couch, where he had tossed his hat and coat. He picked them up and put them on and went out onto the landing — closing the door behind him with care, as if he did not want anyone to hear him.

Jack’s note fluttered from the door to the landing. Wade leaned down and picked it up and read it: Meet me at Toby’s. I got some good news today. Love, Jack. Wade inserted the note between the door and the jamb just above the doorknob, where Jack had placed it, then went down the stairs. He started up Pop’s truck and left, heading north on Route 29, out of town, toward home.

THIS TIME, FOR HIS MEETING with J. Battle Hand, Wade dressed up, or at least he did not appear in his work clothes: he wore the dark-blue gabardine sports jacket and brown trousers he had worn to Ma’s funeral, with a white shirt and a green-and-silver diagonally striped tie — clothing he had purchased over the last couple of years at J. C. Penney’s in Littleton, so that he could go to weddings or funerals or out with Margie for a movie and Chinese food, say, and not look like a hick, a woodchuck, a goddamned shitkicker from the hills of Cow Hampshire.

Lillian had always scolded Wade about his taste in clothing: he did not have bad taste, she told him, he had no taste, which was worse. He simply did not care how his clothing looked, she explained; he cared only that it functioned adequately to cover his nakedness and protect him from the elements. Early on, Lillian had actually found this quality endearing, but as she grew older and a bit more sophisticated herself, Wade’s apparent inability to care how he looked began to embarrass and irritate her. Then, three years before, when he had gone to court for his divorce wearing what he wore every day in those days — dark-blue twill trousers and shirt, with Wade on the left shirt pocket and LaRiviere Co. on the right— Lillian had been unable, even on so formal and momentous an occasion, to restrain her embarrassment and deep irritation with his clothing, and her words had cut him deeply enough to let him, for the first time in his life, see himself in his clothes as he thought others saw him, and he never wore LaRiviere’s uniform again, even to work. They had come out of the courtroom, during the judge’s lunch break, still waiting for their case to be heard, and were standing in the hallway outside, and, while talking strategy with their respective lawyers, had inadvertently backed into each other. When they turned to apologize for the bump, they both expected to see a stranger, but instead husband and wife suddenly found themselves standing face to face.

Wade looked into her eyes and gazed at the beautiful person he had loved since childhood, eyes as familiar to him as his own hands: in a series of transparent overlays he saw the child, the girl and the woman and mother she had become, and in a thin voice he said, “I wish we weren’t doing this, Lillian, honest to God, I really do.”

She took a step back and viewed him from his black hightopped work shoes to the V of his tee shirt at his open collar, and she pronounced, “You look just like you are, Wade.”

Then she turned away and resumed talking with her lawyer, the tall handsome Jackson Cotter, of Cotter, Wilcox and Browne, a man with gray flecks in his charcoal-colored hair and wearing a three-piece navy-blue pin-striped suit. Clothes make the man, Wade thought. Clothes make the man, and the lawyer makes the client. He saw himself in his clothes the way a stranger would, and he saw a stupid unimaginative man, and he noticed that his lawyer, Robert Emile Chagnon, wore an ill-fitting kelly-green corduroy suit with a yellow knit shirt and no tie and had on a pair of old blue canvas deck shoes with white soles and laces. The man Wade had hired to represent him looked ridiculous and incompetent and dishonest. No doubt just as Wade himself looked.